VS2010 Beta2 Available, Links to posts on Arch Tools in Beta2

  • Article

VS2010 Beta2 is available for download. Install Ultimate and you’ll be able to give the architecture tools a spin, which have been much improved since Beta1. In particular, a lot of work has been put into making it easy to extend the UML designers using Managed Extensibility Framework (MEF). It’s now easy to add your own context menu commands (no need for a VS Package or VSCT definitions), drag drop and double-click gestures and validation constraints. They then get deployed using VSIX, the new, much easier way to extend Visual Studio. You’ll need to download the corresponding VS SDK, for this.

When I get back from holiday I hope to be able to point you at more information on how to create extensions, and samples of extensions.

You’d also do well to take a look at Cameron Skinner’s blog, in particular:

and Chris Lovett’s new blog, in particular:

Chris has some great videos for you to look at.

Also available is the DSL SDK. Between Beta1 and Beta2 a fair amount of work was done on the designer authoring component of DSL Tools, as well as on further improving the quality of the runtime. You’ll find much improved templates for building forms-based designers, support for DSL libraries (now you can share components of a DSL definitions between designers), and MEF extensibility points injected into the Dsl Designer itself, to enable us and the community to extend and customize DSL authoring through simple VSIX extensions. I’m sure that Jean-Marc will blog about all this some more soon.

[Nov 2nd: Changed Microsoft Extensibility Framework to Managed Extensibility Framework. Sorry for the original error.]